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Wisconsin Acts to End Welfare Entirely

Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin today signed legislation to abolish welfare payments in that state by the fall of 1997 and replace them with a system of work programs, child care and subsidies to private employers who hire the poor.

The measure, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature on the initiative of the Republican Governor, was described by its supporters and critics alike as the boldest social policy change undertaken anywhere in the country in half a century.

"Whether it works or not, this is the most revolutionary thing we've seen on welfare," said Doug Besharov, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. "This is starting from scratch."

Because the new system would use money that Washington now sends to Wisconsin in Aid to Families With Dependent Children, the main Federal welfare program, it requires the Government's waiver of Federal welfare law. Final approval of the system, then, rests on the doorstep of the Clinton Administration, which, although having failed to reach agreement with Congress on a national welfare overhaul, has already allowed 37 states, including Wisconsin, to undertake various experiments with their own welfare policies, granting more waivers than were granted during the Reagan and Bush Administrations combined.

Melissa T. Skolfield, a spokeswoman for the Federal Department of Health and Human Services, said tonight, "We are not commenting on the Wisconsin law because the state has not submitted a waiver request yet, and we need to see the legislative language."

But Ms. Skolfield rejected Mr. Thompson's swipe at Mr. Clinton. "Since the President's election," she said, "the Administration has made clear that we would like to see Congress pass a welfare reform bill. That continues to be our position. While waiting for Congress to act, we have been doing our utmost to encourage reform at the local level. We have approved more than 50 waivers in 37 states."

Mr. Thompson has become a national figure through hotly debated changes that he has already made in Wisconsin welfare policy, which have included limits on the length of time that beneficiaries remain eligible for assistance and the penalizing of welfare parents whose children skip school. His success in reducing welfare rolls by about 35 percent since he took office in 1987 has made him enormously popular: he swept to a third term with 67 percent of the vote in 1994.

His new program, called Wisconsin Works, would essentially transform the state's welfare system into an elaborate employment assistance agency. The Governor said he believed that the state could help as many as 30 percent of welfare beneficiaries find jobs in the private sector. Some of the rest would work in community service, in jobs either already existing or to be created by the state. Still others would work for private employers who would receive a subsidy for hiring people now on welfare.

What would be common to all would be paychecks, instead of welfare checks. If they failed on the job, the pay would stop. "What happens to you," the Governor asked a reporter, "if you don't show up for work?"

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As for those unable to work, the Governor said they should be drawing assistance from Supplemental Security Income, the Federal program for the disabled poor.

The new Wisconsin program would provide extensive child-care benefits, assistance in transportation to and from jobs, and job training.

Mr. Thompson conceded that "we're going to spend more" on the program at first than is now spent on welfare. He said the cost would initially be $340 million a year, about $40 million above what now goes for cash welfare payments and other support.

But "in the long run," he said, "it will save taxpayers money," as beneficiaries leave not only relief rolls but also the rolls of the job assistance program and themselves become fully self-supporting taxpayers.

While pieces of this measure have been tried in other states, nothing else comes close to the comprehensiveness of the Wisconsin approach, and some experts on poverty said it was impossible to predict how it would turn out. But many expressed concern about the effect on poor children.

"Almost everyone agrees that the existing welfare system has deep flaws, but you can make a bad system worse," said Tom Corbett, associate director of the Institute for Research on Poverty in Madison, Wis. "What is going to happen to the children of the people who fail to show up for those work programs?"

Mr. Besharov, of the American Enterprise Institute, said he believed that President Clinton would issue the waiver that Wisconsin needs, in large part to position himself as tougher on welfare than is his opponent in the fall election, Senator Bob Dole. In granting so many waivers to states to tighten welfare, he said, Mr. Clinton has already demonstrated that he is willing to break with liberals on the issue.

"Traditional Democratic Presidents," he said, "would never have approved all of those" changes.

Mr. Clinton, who cast himself as a New Democrat during the 1992 campaign and vowed to "end welfare as we know it," will surely be asked during a Presidential election debate to come whether he has fulfilled his promise, Mr. Besharov said, adding:

"And he's going to be able to say, rightly, 'Yes, I have ended it by granting 30-some states these waivers.' When the history is written on this, it will say that Tommy Thompson and Bill Clinton ended welfare as we knew it."